Pencil Whipping Pilots

Currently, pilots need 1,500 hours to get their ATP. Now there are a few exceptions but for the most part and  for the sake of this blog we will use 1,500 hours. The FAA and the United States Congress made this the law of the land after the 2009 Colgan Air Crash in Buffalo New York (Steven, 2023). The reason I bring this up as a question of ethics is that the 1,500 hour rule is nothing more than an honor system. Flight training is expensive and it takes time. The only thing that verifies your hours is a pencil, a logbook, and each person's personal integrity that they only write down the amount of hours that they actually have and only log their flights. Over the years a term has been made called a "Pencil Whipper Pilot" which is someone who takes their pencil and fills out their logbook without actually have flown those corresponding flights. As ADSB gets more and more integrated that may potentially be a line of defense against this as there will be a record that the plane was actually flying at a certain time on a certain day vs someone just writing something down at random.


Steele Lankford


References

Steven. (2023, May 4). The 1500 hour rule in aviation - expert pilot explains. The Pilot Guys. https://www.thepilotguys.com/blog/1500-hour-rule

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